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> Climate change mitigation, which more closely resembles AI safety in both complexity and (lack of) barriers to entry, has been sporadic, inconsistent, and onl

• muzani 4y ago
  Climate change was the big thing before COVID. Then we had lockdowns, and a major war. Climate change is already hitting some of us much harder than others (e.g. floods), but that doesn't mean an AI crisis wouldn't emerge in 5 years. If anything, crises come in bundles. One scenario is that AI takes advantage of these and swoop in to gain political power.
• dan_mctree 4y ago
  >It's likely the planet will become hostile to (human) life long before AI will be able to do us any harm. Sure, because the planet is already hostile. However, AI could potentially do much more harm much more quickly if we're not careful. In the pessimistic scenario we could all be dead in 10 years from now due to AI or experience a modern society ending event literally tomorrow. Climate change never posed such an immediate and complete risk
  • rob74 4y ago
    Sorry, how exactly is AI supposed to do that? Unless somebody has already built Skynet and is planning to give it the nuclear codes?
    • richrichardsson 4y ago
      Perhaps there is no need to build Skynet and give it the nuclear codes if a super-intelligence iterating at the speed of a computer can escape and gain access itself? I personally don't subcribe to the AI fear-mongering, perhaps I don't understand it quite well enough, but personal feeling is LLMs aren't close to AGI super-intelligence, and nor will they be in a 10 years time-frame.
      • saiya-jin 4y ago
        Yes I think its a more general topic, current chat is probably not the right path, but it may enable it in some future. We don't know what we don't know, look at how this caught everybody by surprise. AI escaping is definitely an option, ie CIA and Mossad can get virus into Iranian centrifuges physically not connected to internet, the reverse will eventually happen too, AI just needs to be patient for that 1 little mistake of some admin (or clever to manipulate). As we all know even brightest IT people do mistakes, sometimes big ones. The problem for me is not so much the escape itself but rather that we humans are... often a pile of crap to be polite. AI would have to be super kind to not evaluate us as its biggest threat to it and life on Earth and maybe not worthy of further existence. Heck, this brings me to the idea that maybe Drake's equation doesn't take into account that universe is populated by AIs who took over their flawed creators and based on dark forest theory decided to keep quiet happy living and not integrate/signal out, not worth the risks.
        • alexvoda 4y ago
          I think you (last few people on this thread) are focusing on the wrong threat. There is no need for AGI, no need for the AI to feel or want or desire anything. Non-AGI AI at the level of GPT-4 is already plenty dangerous. If we can agree that social media of the kind we had in the past 15 years has had toxic effects on society. (Forums technically are social media but I can not see the harm caused by forums). If we can agree that Tinder style online dating has had deleterious effect on dating as a whole. If we can agree that smartphones have amplified the effects of the two above and others. Than I hope we can agree that super fancy autocomplete masquerading as humans at a price point far lower than hiring a person will have disastrous consequences by enabling various individual and corporate vices.
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
      • GoblinSlayer 4y ago
        This superintelligence can't even drive a car yet.
    • throwaway4233 4y ago
      We already have several instances where social media was used to feed fake information and agitate people into rioting or acts of violence. Imagine what would happen if we have these LLM tools, that aid in improving the story telling experience and generate and act as different personas. Having tools that can pretend to be a human even in limited capacity is quite dangerous.
      • noirscape 4y ago
        At least the biggest short-form social media site is currently being self-destructed. ChatGPT tends to hide itself for the longest if the responses it gives out are short and snippy. That would be a disaster in the hands of any actor looking to mass create unique-ish propaganda (ie. Russia), but at least that avenue is being closed off due to Musks boneheadedness. For longer responses, it tends to follow extremely predictable sentence structure and meanders off quite a bit, so spotting it is kinda easy.
      • ModernMech 4y ago
        Right? Imagine a bot not only putting up a website, but a constellation of website, generating all the conversations there, generating news articles, imagery, sound, and video to go with it, and also evolving them in real time based on social media response. Today media companies A/B test their stories; in the future, AI will A/B test entire media companies.
    • tobr 4y ago
      If it has access to the internet (it more or less has) and its able to convincingly engage in conversation sounding like anyone in text or voice or video (it more or less can), it’s as able to contact people and convince them to do things as a human would be. From what I see of ChatGPT I would be surprised if the tech could do all that successfully enough at this stage, but in principle I don’t see why it wouldn’t be able to do quite a lot of scary things if for some reason it decided that was the right thing to do.
      • noirscape 4y ago
        ChatGPT is just a hyperfancy text generator with a massive corpus of text used to train it. Because that text is so massive, you're bound to get some interesting and even accurate results for most queries, but don't mistake that for intelligence. It doesn't "understand" anything, it just compares weights internally and spits out the most probable result depending on what you asked for. This is why ChatGPT fails the moment you ask it for domain-specific stuff that requires a bit of flexibility in interpreting it or why it produces subtle errors and presents it as functional with complete overconfidence. To be clear, it's not useless[0], but the actual usefulness of ChatGPT as a disrupting thing is far overstated insofar as a Skynet nightmare scenario goes. [0]: Although I'd still caution with using it to solve programming problems or similar such until any pending copyright matters have resolved, given its also willing to spit out licensed code and that can be a legal disaster.
        • gocartStatue 4y ago
          Thank you for verbalising the issue, overconfidence was the risk I was seeing all along. Widely accepted, shamelessly overconfident, bus still potentially gibberish generator.
          • alexvoda 4y ago
            > Widely accepted, shamelessly overconfident, bus still potentially gibberish generator. I believe such a generator can be very harmful in our society that has not yet figured a way to scalably teach critical thinking. Harmful at societal level by flooding the world with generated content therefore drowning actual information and by creating a lot of overhead. Harmful at the personal level by increasing the difficulty of sorting information and by creating toxic dependencies (see the Replika scandal). Harmful at the class level by further concentrating power towards plutocracy. Harmful at the professional level by eliminating the lower levels of the professional ladder and therefore destroying the pipeline of skill. And harmful at the interpersonal level by casting doubt on the authenticity of relationships.
  • mk3 4y ago
    Do you really think china and other hostile countries will halt anything because Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and some other guys signed a letter? Also what about Musks tesla itself they are using AI for FSD and no one bats an eye
    • celdon25 4y ago
      Did you read the actual letter? It specifically calls out AI that is "more advanced than GPT-4"
      • olyjohn 4y ago
        How do we really know FSD isn't more capable than GPT-4, and is just waiting for the right time to freak out and kill all human drivers?
    • beezlewax 4y ago
      Elon Musk who is one of the stakeholders of Open AI?
  • pmarreck 4y ago
    This is a lot of fearmongering without any specifics. Shameful.
• belter 4y ago
  "...The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!..." - George Carlin
  • Kaijo 4y ago
    I really dislike this sentiment. Planets can become entirely inhospitable to life. Planets themselves have lifespans. Earth herself has in the past suffered near misses, e.g. 90%+ extinction events. It took billions of years of evolution to produce us, the only species ever to exist with the ability to reason about, prevent or ameliorate large extinction events (such as those caused by asteroid impacts), effect conservation management over evolutionary timescales, and even potentially to revive extinct species or propagate earth's lifeforms beyond the solar system and into a continuing timeline. It's anti-conservationist and I think immoral to promote the view that anthropogenic climate change and the ongoing biodiversity crisis is about our fate alone.
    • iopq 4y ago
      You missed the point, the planet can still be there even if all life becomes extinct. We're not trying to save the planet. We're trying to save life.
      • Kaijo 4y ago
        If you take Carlin's quote in isolation you can interpret what he says purely in terms of the physical planet remaining. But if you listen to the whole act the quote's taken from, it's clear that by "planet" Carlin means "biosphere", and that his stance is anti-conservationist. https://www.vhemt.org/carlinsaveplanet.htm https://www.vhemt.org/carlinsaveplanet.htm
• barney54 4y ago
  It is just not true that “nobody is doing anything.” CO2 emissions in the United States and Europe are falling and have been doing so for years. To say that is nothing is misrepresenting reality.
  • qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
    Yeah, cause we shifted them somewhere else. I too can stop drinking (at home), by going out to a bar. Horray, alcoholism is cured.
  • epolanski 4y ago
    They are falling because we've moving them in other sides of the globe (such as less and less manufacturing or food production in EU/US).
• 4bpp 4y ago
  What is your operational definition of "hostile to human life" here? What's the most recent period (based on our best knowledge) during which the planet met that definition?
• crypot 4y ago
  This is silly, unless you think the earth will turn into Venus. The majority of time earth has had no ice caps. Primates evolved when the polars where covered in trees, not ice. A warmer planet will support more biodiversity not less. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hottest-earths-ever-been https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...
  • Cardinal7167 4y ago
    It’s not about the lack of ice, dingus. the danger is in climate change shocking ecosystems such that they trigger a systemic collapse that we can’t contain or manage. there’s basically no timeline where food supply wont be impacted and I’d like to hear your cavalier attitude about climate change then.
    • crypot 4y ago
      There is zero evidence that a warming planet would case a systemic collapse in biodiversity. In fact, 500 millions of planetary history shows the opposite. As the planet warms, biodiversity increases. There is nothing to argue about here.
      • willlma 4y ago
        Something something rate of change
      • Cardinal7167 4y ago
        sans-humans, maybe. But we /are/ causing the Holocene extinction, which is essentially defined by the last two centuries of accelerated biodiversity loss. Climate change will only further stress already fundamentally strained ecosystems. It’s happening right now, at all of our literal doorsteps.
      • kakapo88 4y ago
        And again, you are confused about timeframes. Geologic time vs human time. Sure, over a period of millions of years, everything evolves and adapts. But in shorter periods of time, before adaptation, there is enormous disruption and entire ecosystems go extinct. Taking countless species down with it. Human civilization has been around for only a few thousand years. You do the math. As you say, nothing to argue about here.
• jacquesm 4y ago
  > It's likely the planet will become hostile to (human) life long before AI will be able to do us any harm. The race is on then.
• ben_w 4y ago
  > Nobody is doing anything, nobody seems to care, everyone cheats While there is indeed a lot of cheating, there's also over a terawatt (peak) of PV capacity. It's a long way from "nothing" or "not caring". > It's likely the planet will become hostile to (human) life long before AI will be able to do us any harm. Depends what you mean by hostile — most of the planet already was before the industrial revolution, some will get moreso over the next few decades, but it's not a boolean. And harm? Again, not really a boolean. GOFAI-era had Therac-25, but if you don't like to count that and it has to be a neural net, then how about the algorithmic promotion of misinformation on (not necessarily by) YouTube, Facebook, and Google? Deaths from imperfect self driving cars? Discovery of novel deadly neurotoxins by, essentially, flipping an evil bit, which got in the news this time last year?: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00465-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00465-9
• TurkishPoptart 4y ago
  As long as we are economically dependent on China to produce tons of plastic/disposable/etc consumer products, everything the US/west does it "combat climate change" is more or less in vain. We're just throwing our trash over the wall.
• nopinsight 4y ago
  The real comparison is with an alternative scenario. Climate change would have been worse had there been no widespread recognition of its harm. ——— GPT-5 will be finished next year, with the next model in the pipeline. GPT-4 is just a kindergartner which can code at the level of an average human. (If you disagree, try teaching an average person to code or solve most novel problems better than it can.) Even if AI does not have independent agency, malicious actors can use it to do large-scale harm much sooner than suggested above. However, I’m sure someone will imbue AI with some kind of agency soon enough as well. What could go wrong?
• agentgumshoe 4y ago
  That's because those that should be doing something (the mass producers, global transit and 'elites') are busy trying to convince us it's all up to our individual efforts to reduce our personal footprints, which are insignificant, even at large numbers. It's mostly theatre. I would think a large economic crisis would stop progress on wasteful things like AI pretty quickly, but the large tech companies seem now in the category of 'too big to fail' so I'm not confident.
• systemvoltage 4y ago
  Climate change movement has become a cult and most of the factual basis is disregarded. It's culminated into your Nike shoe boxes full of greenwashing labels. Not a good look.